Cities and towns -- Middle Atlantic States; Middle Atlantic States -- History
Water-works were at last built, the most considerable then known, their
site where the Public Buildings stand and their picture in the Historical
Society; a systematic street scavenging began, building on the back of
lots was prohibited, years before New York, and two generations before
the European city; a fixed yardage, small, but sufficient to transform
the city map, was required of each dwelling; paving and sewerage
commenced, the almshouse was moved, a city hospital was established,
and a most important legal decision made easy the purchase of house
lots by the poor and frugal. The solution was not complete. Typhoid
lurks where yellow fever once raged, but crowding was prevented and
the city has no slums in the region outside of the area which has been
built over since the ordinances of the first twenty to thirty years of
this century stopped overcrowding and saved its poorer citizens from
the awful fate inflicted by the titled avarice and civic mislegislation
of London and Glasgow. Nor ought any one to look across the Schuylkill
from the Zoölogical Garden at the lovely and related group which houses
the Fairmount Water-works without a thrill of pride that this was the
beginning of the problem of preserving health in heat and rain, which
since the world began had meant pestilence to the city in like climes.
As is the American habit, the supply looked first to quantity, and later
to quality; and as is also the American habit, both will be secured in
the end. So the large provision for the almshouse of seventy years ago
has given the space for the University and its buildings, its cognate
institutions, hospitals and museums, taken collectively, one of the most
liberal grants made by any modern city to the work of higher education
not under its own control, a grant which owed its initiative and early
success to Dr. William Pepper, whose statue overlooks the site he secured
to learning and to science. There the University has grown, covered its
site with a score of buildings, added department to department, doubled
its students in a decade, received more in gifts under its present
Provost, Mr. Charles C. Harrison, than had come to it in all the
century and a half of its history, knit the community to it and given it
intellectual leadership by a group of affiliated societies, linked itself
to the public schools by municipal scholarships supported by the city,
opened courses for teachers, spread its lectures over the State and in
all ways made itself not only an institution of learning for students,
but of teaching for the community.
[Illustration: DR. WILLIAM PEPPER.]
[Illustration: FRANK THOMSON.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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